Case Study: ALS Never Surrender Foundation achieves exponentially richer ALS progression tracking with Claris

Clinical use tracking ALS disease progression

ALS Never Surrender Foundation, started by technologist Steph Courdin after his ALS diagnosis, set out to solve the problem of sparse, subjective disease-tracking: traditional clinic visits capture patients’ progression only a few times a year (about 240 data points per patient over the disease course), leaving researchers with limited, irregular information to study this fast-moving neurodegenerative disease.

The foundation built the eNGAGE/INVOLVE mobile app on the Claris platform to let patients log 80+ daily metrics remotely—covering motion, breathing, speech and other vitals—and partnered with Google AI, IBM Watson, Apple and Aural Analytics. With a $300,000 grant to deploy the app across five major clinical sites, the project vastly increases data capture (to the equivalent of ~116,000 points for the same time period), enables proactive clinical support and aims for FDA approval to scale access to thousands of ALS patients.

ALS Never Surrender Foundation

Nic Friedman

Chief Executive Officer